bandman@newcastle[501]:~$ aliasalias :q!=’exit’alias ls=’ls –color=auto’bandman@newcastle[502]:~$

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In my younger days as an assistant network administrator, I would always be assisting my superior in retooling some part of the network. Upgrading or reinstalling a system here, rewiring a switch there. I always felt like we were doing these things for nothing. I mean, here we were working when we could be doing [...]

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As I write this, I’m on hold with Dell tech support. It seems that my blade enclosure’s DRAC card has somehow become detached from the Avocent KVM card. The general configuration screen shows the card, but none of the management interfaces are able to reach it. Apparently there’s a reconfiguration necessary through OpenManage, which I [...]

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I’m fighting with centralized authentication again. I haven’t finally decided whether I’m going to do a half-hearted attempt at reliably authenticating Linux against Active Directory or against OpenLDAP (or one of any number of other LDAP servers that people seem to hurl as suggestions). I suspect my problem hasn’t been server-software related. More likely a [...]

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Here’s a link to a very insightful post from Last In – First Out regarding the best-practices of systems management. It deals with Ad-Hoc Management versus Structured Management, and it’s full of outstanding advice. Read it for yourself. Too many times, when we’re the only person responsible for this sort of thing, do we overlook [...]

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I found this today: http://twitter.com/towerbridge In case you’re too lazy to check it out, the Tower Bridge in London sends a twitter every time it opens or closes, with the name of the boat it’s opening for. wow. I wonder how long it will be before SNMP traps are replaced by Twitter messages from servers. [...]

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